Paranoia is something Americans should really fear: Tim Rutten

It has been nearly half a century since Harpers published historian Richard Hofstadter’s ground-breaking essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” in which he charted the recurrent influence of conspiracy theories and what he called “movements of suspicious discontent” on our nation’s history.

Hofstadter’s 1964 piece, perhaps the most influential Harpers has published in its long history, was based on a lecture he’d given at Oxford some months before and grew directly out of his reflections on the role of the radical right in Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign.

“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” he wrote. “In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated ... how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

Hofstadter convincingly demonstrated the persistence of the paranoid style throughout the American Republic’s political evolution, but a close observer hardly could be blamed for thinking that the trauma of the 9/11 tragedies and Barack Obama’s election as president have ushered in something of a golden age for paranoids and conspiracy theorists. We’ve had “truthers,” who insist that the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and attack on the Pentagon were the work of U.S or Israeli intelligence or Goldman Sachs and/or George Soros — take your pick. (There’s even a truther faction that accepts Al Qaeda as 9/11’s perpetrator, but believes it was manipulated into the attacks by the U.S. and Israel.)

We’ve had the “birthers,” who insist that Obama was not born in the United States or that he’s a kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate and/or a secret socialist bent on supplanting the Constitution with repressive collectivism — after he rounds up all the gun owners, closes the churches and imposes Sharia, of course.

The Tea Party is an entire political tendency within the contemporary Republican Party that draws its members from believers in these anxious fantasies or their barely domesticated variants. Hence the current gridlock in Congress, testimony to the continued relevance of Hofstadter’s observation about the leverage of passionate minorities.

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Even so, this past week has been something of a high water point in the flood of paranoid anxieties in which we now seem to be awash. The sudden breakthrough of the marriage equality movement, for example, was bound to generate its own backlash against gays and lesbians, but — for sheer vicious paranoia — it’s hard to top last week’s fulminations by televangelist and former GOP presidential hopeful Pat Robertson, who told his cable TV audience that gay men in San Francisco were deliberately spreading AIDS by wearing sharp jewelry somehow impregnated with the virus. They allegedly shake hands with people, cutting them and infecting them with the disease.

“You know what they do in San Francisco?” he asked his viewers. “Some of the gay community there, they want to get people. So, if they’ve got the stuff, they’ll have a ring. You shake hands and the ring’s got a little thing where you cut your finger. Really. I mean it’s that kind of vicious stuff, which would be the equivalent of murder.”

At worst, Robertson’s ravings probably do little more than reinforce the prejudices of that ever-declining number of Americans who insist they ought to be able to continue discriminating against gay and lesbian people. Other paranoid fantasies resonate in the wider world — or within our own country in new and dangerously destructive ways.

Take, for instance, the allegations by Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas, that Obama’s administration has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and that the chief executive is an active sympathizer with its aims. “This administration has so many Muslim Brotherhood members that have influence that they just are making wrong decisions for America,” Gohmert told an interviewer.

The paranoid congressman’s American audience may be relatively small; the problem is that in Egypt, where conspiracy theories about U.S. motives are rife, they get a big hearing when they come from an elected American official. As The New York Times reported last week, references to the administration’s alleged ties to the Muslim brotherhood are “widespread” and anti-military factions have posted a video of Gohmert speaking on the Internet, creating God knows what complexities for U.S. diplomats in Cairo.

As Shadi Hamid, a Brookings Institution Middle East analyst, told Talkingpointsmemo.com last week, “This does provide real ammunition to the conspiracy theorists when you have American sources seemingly verifying what they are saying. It lends these bizarre theories a new code of legitimacy and amplifies them. When Egyptians see this, they don’t realize that just because a U.S. congressman is saying this that it can be wrong or that he can be lying publicly.”

Then there are the serious domestic repercussions of the kind of anti-Muslim paranoia promoted by Gohmert and like-minded right-wingers, such as the former deputy assistant secretary of defense-turned radio host and commentator, Frank Gaffney. (The latter, you may recall, testified against a group of Tennessee Muslims whose intolerable offense was trying to build a mosque in which to worship.)

Last week, the Associated Press reported that “The New York Police Department has secretly labeled entire mosques as terrorism organizations, a designation that allows police to use informants to record sermons and spy on imams, often without specific evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Designating an entire mosque as a terrorism enterprise means that anyone who attends prayer services there is a potential subject of an investigation and fair game for surveillance ... The strategy has allowed the NYPD to send undercover officers into mosques and attempt to plant informants on the boards of mosques and at least one prominent Arab-American group in Brooklyn ...”

Chilling doesn’t begin to describe that kind of police-state bullying.

We pay a high price for our neighbors’ unopposed paranoia.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. Ruttencolumn@gmail.com